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Perspective and commentary by Marshall Breeding

Perceptions 2010: An International Survey of Library Automation

I have posted the results the fourth annual survey of data collected on how libraries rate their current integrated library system, the company involved, and the quality of customer support. The survey also aims to gather data regarding attitudes regarding interest levels in open source ILS products.
Perceptions 2010: an international survey of library automation gives the general conclusions and presents all the statistical results derived from the survey. As usual, some of the most interesting and valuable information lies in the comments offered by responders.

Top survey findings

Apollo, developed by
Biblionix topped the rankings in ILS satisfaction and company satisfaction,
and second best ILS Support. This product topped all of the satisfaction in
last year’s survey results.
Most libraries adopting Apollo and have migrated from abandoned products such as Winnebago Spectrum and Athena or
or are automating for the first time. Apollo finds use exclusively in small public libraries.

This year two open source ILS products earned top marks.
OPALS, targeting K-12 school libraries and
Koha when supported by
ByWater Solutions.

OPALS, an open source ILS created and
supported by MediaFlex also gave stellar performance, ranking a tiny notch
below Apollo in ILS satisfaction and company satisfaction and received top rankings in support satisfaction.

ByWater Solutions did the best in the
company loyalty department, placed third for ILS satisfaction, support satisfaction, and company satisfaction.
ByWater Solutions provides support services for the Koha open source ILS.

Products that ranked highest in earlier years of the survey, including and
Polaris from
Polaris Library Systems
and
AGent VERSO from
Auto-Graphics, continue to receive satisfaction scores just as high as before,
but fall below the
superlative marks given by libraries involved with Apollo, OPALS, or Koha as supported by ByWater Solutions.

Except for the libraries already using one, the survey reflected fairly low levels of interest in migrating to an open source ILS, even when the company rates their satisfaction with their current proprietary ILS and its company as poor. Other than libraries already running an open source ILS, and for Voyager (5) and Aleph (1), the mode score from libraries using proprietary ILS products was 0. Though the open source interest scores were low, a substantial portion of
libraries that registered some interest in moving to a new ILS named open source products among the replacement candidates.

Just as I did for the previous editions survey, I created an interactive tool for viewing the statistical summaries and comments. The main tables in the article show statistics only for those products that had more than 20 survey responses. You can use the ILS Product Report to view the statistics on any of the products mentioned in the survey and to read the comments about that system, even if the number of responses did not meet the threshold. The comments that display have been edited to remove any text that identifies the individual or institution, preserving the anonymity of the responders. The narrative data in the comments largely corroborate the statistical responses and makes for interesting reading.